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January 29, 2014

My next bookis set in 1898. What was happening in America that year? McKinley was president, the Spanish-American war began and ended, and Hawaii was annexed, all well known events. But here are some rather amusing, little known happenings for 1898:

Atlantic City as it looked in between 1890 and 1910 (photo from Wiki Commons)

January 17, 2014

Reprinted with permission from the Alley Newspaper, October 6, 2009, by Sue Hunter Weir

"Bring a shawl and get a baby" from a 1908-09 Baby Farm

3341 Nicollet Avenue

The babies were buried in unmarked graves in The Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery

Between June 24, 1908 and September 6, 1909, 27 infants died at the same address–3341 Nicollet Avenue South. These babies (13 girls, 13 boys, and one whose gender was not recorded) were under the care of “Doctor” Hans Oftedal. As the quote marks suggest, Hans Oftedal was not a licensed physician; he was the proprietor of one of several “baby farms” operating in Minneapolis at the time.

Baby farms were essentially unlicensed boarding houses for infants whose parents were too poor to care for them. The parents surrendered their children to baby farm operators and paid a fee for the care that they believed their children would receive. In some cases, the parents intended to come back and reclaim their children, but in other cases they expected their children to be adopted by families who could provide for them. Adoption was unregulated at that time, and Minneapolis had the dubious distinction of being the baby-trafficking capitol of the Upper Midwest. The Minneapolis Tribune described the adoption trade in Minneapolis as one in which people could “Bring a shawl and get a baby.”

In October 1909, “Doctor” Oftedal shut down his baby farm. He ordered the utilities turned off and abandoned five infants in the care of two teen-aged girls. The girls had no food or supplies with which to take care of the babies. Eventually staff from the city’s Poor Department, as it was called at the time, got wind of what was happening and tried to take charge of the babies. At first the girls declined to give up their charges but eventually turned the babies over to city authorities. The good news was that all of those babies survived although three of them were in poor health. One of them was a five-month old child who had been one of the incubator babies successfully treated at Wonderland Park but who had lost considerable ground after being fed only skim milk while under Oftedal’s care.

After he closed down his operation, “Doctor” Oftedal, his wife, and a woman identified in the press as Nurse Siegel, fled to Seattle, Washington. City officials did not track them down and prosecute them. Indeed, it is doubtful that anyone had any idea about the 27 babies who had died—at least none of the newspapers mentioned them. The babies died from a variety of causes, many of them from gastrointestinal problems or pneumonia. Two of them died from malnutrition. They ranged in age from two days to 18 months old.

In 1917 the Minnesota Legislature adopted a Children’s Code aimed at regulating adoption and requiring that hospitals and boarding homes that took in homeless children be licensed. The bill was overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court on a technicality, but soon afterwards the flaws in the original bill were corrected and the provisions of the Children’s Code were put into practice.

During the 1920s, Hans Oftedal returned to Minnesota. He was no longer a “doctor,” but was listed in the City Directory as a carpenter.